Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Bell Labs

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

What do lasers, photovoltaic cells, the transistor, digital cameras, cell phone technology, the communication satellite, computer networking, radio astronomy, and the UNIX operating system have in common? They were all invented or developed at the same place by the greatest collection of scientists and engineers ever assembled. Learn more about Bell Labs, the greatest research laboratory in history, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do lasers, photovoltaic cells, the transistor, digital cameras, cell phone technology, the communication satellite, computer networking, radio astronomy, and the Unix operating system all have in common? They were all invented or developed at the same place by the greatest collection of scientists and engineers ever assembled. Learn more about Bell Labs, the greatest research laboratory in history, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thuline podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by rerouted.co. I've told you before that rerouted is a great place to buy affordable, used adventure and outdoor gear. However, it's also a great place to sell your... used gear. If you have gear sitting around your house that you no longer use, re-routed can find a

good home for your equipment. R rerouted believes that each piece of gear has a story, and they want to help you tell yours. Before you go and buy your next piece of outdoor or adventure gear, you owe it to yourself to check out rerouted.co. It could save you a bundle, and they can also help you sell your used gear as well. Once again, that is rerouted.co. Bell Labs pretty much invented everything. Okay, maybe that isn't quite true, but it's also not far from the truth. Bell Labs was the single greatest innovation engine of the 20th century. The only thing I can really think of that would even be close to it would have been Thomas Edison's lab in the late 19th and early 20th century. Bell Labs was founded by and named after Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.

In 1880, he received an award called the Volta Prize from the French government for the invention of the telephone. The award is 50,000 French francs, which was worth a belliger. $10,000 at the time. With the money, he established the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the lab was to work mostly on audio-related technology, such as telephone technology, phonographs, and technology to help the death. In 1887, it spun off the Volta Bureau, which changed its name several times over the years,

and today is known as the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Heart of Hearing. At the same time, the company he created Bell Telephone, which later became American Telephone and Telegraph, became a monopoly owning the entire telephone industry in the United States. They didn't just own the telephone lines, but they also owned all the telephones. You literally could not buy a telephone from anyone other than Bell Telephone. The actual telephones, as well as the switching equipment, were manufactured by a company called Western Electric,

which was a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T. On January 25, 1925, Bell Telephone Laboratories was created which consolidated all of the research and development in the entire Bell system. In addition, all of the regional Bell companies had to pay a licensing fee based on their revenue to Bell Labs, which was the license holder for all of the technology for the Bell system. In addition, all of the regional Bell companies had to pay a licensing fee based on their revenue to Bell Labs, which was the license holder for the technology for the entire Bell system. At its inception, the labs had 3,600 scientists, engineers, and staff, and there were

headquartered on the lower west side of Manhattan. Bell Labs at this stage in time, and for the next several decades, was a perfect storm of research. They were given an incredible amount of money from what was the largest legal monopoly in the richest country in the world. In theory, they were responsible for developing and improving the technology for Bell systems, but their work went far beyond that. Over time, Bell Labs grew and opened more locations around the country. They had facilities in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Colorado, and Illinois. The largest facility by the number of people employed was in Naperville, Illinois, which employed over 11,000 people.

The fortunes of Bell Labs followed the fortunes of AT&T. After the breakup of AT&T in 1982, the future of Bell Labs wasn't very bright. Bell Labs was spun off into a new company called Lucent Technologies in 1996. In addition to the labs, the new company also contained all of the equipment manufacturing of AT&T. That company saw its assets crashed after the dot-com bubble burst, and it was eventually purchased by the French company, Alcatel. In 2016, the company was then purchased by Nokia, and it is known today as Nokia Bell Labs. It is only a fraction of the size it was at its peak. So, history lesson aside, what exactly did Bell Labs do? The answer is, a lot. At a very high level, the work

done by the researchers at Bell Labs over the years earned nine Nobel Prizes. They also earned five touring prizes, which is like the Nobel Prize for Computing Technology. In the 1920s, they created the technology which allowed motion pitchers to sync up with sound. They also created the technique for statistical process control, which was the origin of the Sigma 6 technique for process improvement today. They also created a one-time cipher pad, which is an uncrackable form of encryption, and also did the first long-distance transmission of a television image. In the 1930s, a radio engineer named Carl Jansky was investigating why there was static on shortwave radio transmissions, and he ended up discovering radio waves from the center of the galaxy.

This was the start of radio astronomy. They also invented stereo audio recording, stereo radio transmissions, and the first speech sensitizer. In the 1940s, they created the first photovoltaic cell, which launched the entire solar power industry. In 1947, a team that went on to win a slew of Nobel Prizes developed perhaps their greatest invention, the transistor. The transistor was one of the most important inventions of the 20th century, and will be the subject of its own episode someday. This opened up the door for the entire electronics industry

and eventually the integrated circuit and computers. In the 1950s, they developed the TAT-1, which was the first transatlantic telephone cable that could transmit a whopping 24 calls at one time. They also developed the theoretical foundations for the creation of the laser. In the 1960s, they created the first gas laser. They helped design Telstar, the very first telecommunication satellite. In 1965, they discovered cosmic microwave background radiation,

which helped validate the theory of the Big Bang. And they also created the first version of the Unix operating system, as well as the first charged coupled device, which is the basis of digital cameras. In the 1970s, they developed the C programming language, the first 32-bit microprocessor and the first computerized telephone switching system. They also helped create the first system to deliver voice over fiber optic cables. In the 1980s, they developed both CDMA and TDMA, which was the basis for all digital cell phone signals up until the deployment of 4G and 5G.

They developed C++, which is the programming language in which many, many software programs are written. They also helped deploy the first Transatlantic fiber optic telephone cable. In the 1990s, they developed the first 56K modem and a new type of electron lithography for printing computer chips. Frankly, I'm only scratching the surface of what they developed. Researchers at Bell Labs have been awarded over 17,000 patents over the years. Many of them were important yet obscure breakthroughs that would be very difficult to explain in a podcast like this. In the process of recording this episode and delivering it to you, there were numerous innovations developed at Bell Labs which help make this episode possible.

Today, Bell Labs is a shell of its former self. As of 2008, it was reported that there were only four physicists on staff, and that number probably isn't any greater today. The role that it played in research and development is now in the hands of new big companies. However, for several decades, Bell Labs was the global leader in research and development. From fiber optics to lasers, to electronics, to wireless technology, so much of our modern world wouldn't be possible without the inventions which came out of Bell Labs. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere daily is Thor Thompson.

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